My bulimic and schizophrenic way of reading has stacked up four books on my nightstand. They are: Make Me Do Things by Victoria Redel, The Son by Philipp Meyer, Un Caso come gli Altri by Pasquale Ruju, and Purity by Jonathan Franzen. I’ve just finished the Marekors by Jo Nesbø, but it is not worth a structured comment – the aftertaste is only a lack of freshness, the plot too.
I was reading Make Me Do Things more than a month ago, but I had to leave and I didn’t bring the book with me. So, I’m reading it again and this opportunity is a gift since Victoria Redel’s prose is fascinating – and only superficially simple, be careful. Actually, she follows a deep path of understanding the synapses of life through stories, each of which adds a brick of perception and judgement. So, the real character is the prismatic nature of existence, while the collection of the accounts represents a probative spectrum of the multifaceted mystery of our soul. Everything is perfectly told, with a grain of transversal and fluid poetry, which is Victoria Redel’s distinctive mark and the child of a wonderful and elegant sensibility. I have in mind two ideas – I don’t dare call them suggestions – which require an explanation at the very least. I feel that there is a discrepancy between Victoria Redel’s sensibility/poetry and the set of her stories, which is taken for granted and doesn’t adjoin a particular significance. I think that a considerable added value would result from a different location and perspective. Let’s imagine her next stories set in a town like Prague, just for an example, or in the Mediterranean area or perhaps in South America. Victoria Redel’s poetry can fit various emotional and spiritual atmospheres, making it better, I’m sure, since she owns that kind of perceptual genes. The second idea is about a theatrical play. I feel that Victoria Redel’s work is very close to being an exceptional play – if she wanted that – with an interesting fan of characters. I see the stage and hear their voices. Who knows in the future?
About The Son by Philipp Meyer, well, I was very curious about this Great American Novel (according to the critics), for which, by the way, I have been waiting for a long, long time. There are three stories of three generations of one family, set in Texas, America, starting from 1836 to today. The first story is about the patriarch, Eli McCullough, born in 1836 when the Republic of Texas declared itself independent. At the age of eight, Eli and his brother are kidnapped by the Comanches, while his mother and his sister are raped and killed. Then, his brother too is killed and Eli lives for many years with a Comanche tribe. Definitely, this is the best part of the novel. The second story is about Eli’s son, Peter McCullough. Texas is changing dramatically – and violently – passing from a world based on herds of cows to a polluted land of oil fields. The third story tells the life of Jeanne Anne McCullough, the grandchild of Peter, who would become the fifth richest woman in Texas. A sort of nemesis closes her existence. The book is a good book, interesting and sometimes epic, but it is not a masterpiece and definitely it is not the expected Great American Novel. I think that the weak point of the book is the way in which history is put into it. More than history, in fact, it is the result of good research, but everything seems somehow forced and not internalised. Specifically, the passage from the particular of the plot to the big picture of history, and vice versa, is missed or, in any case, it is artificial and trivial. What a pity. The history of Texas appears to be compelling, it is true, and it is an interesting cross-section of American history full of violence and forgotten crimes and characters, but the way used by Philipp Meyer to ‘inhale’ and encompass this great horizon into the story of a family is naive and rushed. There are too many things, maybe too many layers. At the end, the long novel remains an unfinished one, and really the memory of the McCullough family is not strong or incisive at all.
A friend of mine gave me Un Caso come gli Altri by Pasquale Ruju, a rookie writer, and commenting is easy. The novel is only a draft, maybe a good draft with potential, but in need of deep editing and restructuring. Ruju seems blindly to follow the example of Massimo Carlotto, a writer who has created his own dark and violent style, but without having the same power and impact. It is better to wait for Pasquale Ruju’s second attempt, in the hope that his writing will be deeper and cleaner.
The first fifty pages of Purity by Jonathan Franzen are really intriguing and, at a first impression, the novel seems excellent and surprising. It is a joy to have a good book on your nightstand, waiting for you, ready to disclose a new world. I’ll write the review later, since I want to enjoy it slowly.
PS: Elizabeth Strout has published another novel, My Name is Lucy Barton. I viscerally hate Elizabeth Strout, her provincialism and narrow mind. Her Olive Kitteridge, which won the Pulitzer Prizee for fiction, is really an incredible work of low quality. For this reason, I’m going to buy My Name is Lucy Barton. I want to understand.
Ciriaco Offeddu
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